Chicago is stupefying… an Olympian freak, a fable, an allegory, an incomprehensible phenomenon… monstrous, multifarous, unnatural, indomitable, puissant, preposterous, transcendent… throw the dictionary at it!
Places Quotes
Men hang out their signs indicative of their respective trades: shoemakers hang out a gigantic shoe; jewelers, a monster watch; and the dentist hangs out a gold tooth; but up in the mountains of New Hampshire, God Almighty has hung out a sign to show that there He makes men.
If the continent were water and the water land, Key West is where all the sweetness and bitterness, all the honey and sour acids of our complicated American lives would drain. The southernmost point in the United States. Land’s end. Old glory and present decay.
In Vineyard Haven, on Martha’s Vineyard, mostly I love the soft collision here of harbor and shore, the subtly haunting briny quality that all small towns have when they are situated on the sea.
In Italy for thirty years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, bloodshed they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love, five hundred years of democracy and peace and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.
Las Vegas is a man-made paradise, the fallen Adam in the arms of a neon serpent. This is Playland as Eden, essentially infantile, but it entrances many bored people, including lot of foreigners.
Walking in Karnak was like walking into one of Piranesi’s Prison, solidified suddenly into stone, and grown to natural, nay to heroic size. Piled on fantastic ruin, obelisks pricked the sky; the colossal aisle soared, its base plunged in the deepest shadow, its head lifted to the moon; shafts of light struck the columns, lay […]
There must be something in the Japanese character that saves them from the despair Americans feel in similar throes of consuming. The American, gorging himself on merchandise, develops a sense of guilty self-consciousness; if the Japanese have these doubts they do not show them. Perhaps hesitation is not part of the national character, or perhaps […]
So it goes on mile after mile – Chicago… It was like a prolonged, enlarded mingling of the south side of London with all that is bleak and ugly in the Black Country. It is the most perfect presentation of nineteenth century individualistic industrialism I have ever seen – in its vast, its magnificent squalor; […]
Well, at least we won’t have to go back through South Dakota. Apochryphal last words
